2 bodies in car found under tons of coal in rail bridge collapse

Authorities say it's 'definitely possible' more victims may be discovered at Glenview-Northbrook site

A crane Thursday lifts a nearly flattened car found under tons of coal and debris from Wednesday's railroad bridge collapse over Shermer Road near the border of Glenview and Northbrook. Two bodies were found in the car, authorities said. (Keri Wiginton, Chicago Tribune)

Seventeen hours after salvage crews started to dig through tons of spilled Wyoming coal, derailed freight hoppers and twisted ruins of a collapsed railroad bridge, authorities on Thursday discovered an automobile buried in the wreckage with two bodies inside.

Authorities said there could be more victims and, using a crane and other equipment, they continued to search through the wreckage Thursday evening. The derailment on the Glenview-Northbrook border appears to have been caused by tracks warped by heat, railroad officials said.

Officials initially said no one was injured when the 138-car Union Pacific Railroad coal train bound for Wisconsin derailed Wednesday afternoon on a viaduct over Shermer Road near Willow Road. But Thursday morning, crews spotted the bumper of a car and dug around it with shovels.

Workers could be seen clearing off what appeared to be the windshield of a vehicle, then covering the area with a blue tarp. Officials on the scene said one body was inside, and they were working to remove it.

By late afternoon, crews still were trying to determine whether more vehicles were buried in the debris, Glenview fire Chief Wayne Globerger said. Officials from the Cook County medical examiner's office were on the scene.

Shortly before 5 p.m., Globerger confirmed that a second body was found in the car. The driver was a man, he said. But the fire chief could not confirm the sex of the second victim.

The nearly flattened car, with the bodies inside, was loaded onto a flatbed truck and taken to the Cook County medical examiner's office. Work crews remained on the scene looking for signs of any other vehicles.

While the investigation of the derailment continued, extreme heat causing the steel rails to expand between the ties, called a rail kink, was identified as a likely cause of the derailment that led to the subsequent bridge collapse, a Union Pacific spokesman said. The train was en route from Wyoming to an electricity plant in Milwaukee. The bridge is owned and maintained by Union Pacific, officials said.

The investigation, led by the Federal Railroad Administration, is expected to take months, but the sequence of events is now clear, according to Union Pacific officials.

The preliminary investigation has ruled out the failure of the bridge as the cause of the derailment, Union Pacific spokesman Mark Davis said. The 86-foot-long bridge was not designed to carry the cumulative load of 28 derailed coal cars all at once, Davis said. Each car weighs 75 tons to 85 tons on average and up to 100 tons in some cases, he said.

The elevated tracks surrounding the bridge are built on an embankment. The embankment, made from compacted landfill, did not play a role in causing the accident, Davis said.

A Federal Railroad Administration spokesman declined to comment on preliminary findings, referring most questions to Union Pacific officials. "We are in charge of (approving) the track on the bridge, not the bridge itself,'' agency spokesman Michael England said. The agency delegates many inspection duties to the railroads. In the case of the Shermer Road rail overpass, Union Pacific employees inspect the bridge and their report is turned over to the Federal Railroad Administration.

Through Thursday's sweltering heat and an afternoon downpour, Union Pacific crews clad in helmets and orange vests cleared the train's wreckage piece by piece. Black soot from the upended freight of coal covered some workers, who walked from the scene to a nearby water truck to rinse off. Officials estimate the excavation could take days.

Erich Gibbs, who owns a business in the area, said he was driving on Shermer under the bridge about noon Wednesday, less than two hours before the accident, and he saw a worker wearing a colored safety vest walking on the tracks.

"It looked like he was checking something out,'' said Gibbs, 72, of Wilmette. "An hour and a half later, the train .... crushed the bridge.''

Davis confirmed that Union Pacific inspectors and monitoring equipment were on the tracks before the accident checking for possible abnormalities in track gauge or shifting. Such inspections are routinely conducted twice a day during extreme heat or cold, he said.

Because of the "heat order," a 40-mph slow zone order, down from 50 mph normally on that segment of track, was in effect at the time of the accident, Davis said. An event recorder in the locomotive showed that the train was traveling at 37 mph when it derailed, he said.

"We ruled out the bridge failing and then the train derailing (by being driven off the tracks,) based on the discussion with the train crew'' as well as viewing the images from a camera on the train, Davis said.

The weight of derailed coal hoppers concentrated on the bridge far exceeded the span's structural design limits, he said.